I am building a team to play with for a long haul, not grabbing someone for a pick up game cause we are one player short.

the best analogy I can give is that at work I (and many companies) are looking for a marriage, not a one-night stand. no matter what your technical provess is, it takes a while for you to learn the domain and get gelled with the team. While this is happening, we are all putting a significant effort to make this happen. if you then turn around and leave the entire has wasted a whole bunch time/effort and even if you are some “rock star” SWE we lose

Not trying to be difficult, but you're not really addressing my question.

Why can't you address this with mitigants I mentioned? It sounds like you do some of that with "other non-$ comp" (mandatory PTO, parental leave,...) that's use it or lose it, but those are table stakes these days.

I love the idea of thinking about a long term marriage and contracting accordingly, but at some point it's a leap of faith.

Your bias has a presumably unforced handicap. Losing that 100x programmer may not matter to your business/personal goals to make GOOD wealth accumulation, but it will hurt your changes to go from GOOD to GREAT outcomes.

That sounds very sensible, for some of the better kinds of companies.

How do you handle retention, once you "marry" an employee?

If the manager retired, would the company keep nurturing that?